Hello and welcome! This week’s Melendy Avenue Review is pretty good, I think. I published a review in San Antonio Review and link to it here. I’ve got another fun Birthday Lecture, this one prompted in part by a guy I saw on the subway once bragging about how American Sniper was the only book he had ever read. I review a book I had high but disappointed hopes for. Roomie Ed chimes in with some links to fun stuff. All in all, good clean fun! Share, comment, enjoy!
CONTENTS
Review Link-
Berard Reviews Michael Trask’s “Ideal Minds”
Video Content-
Lethality and Merit
Reviews-
Steven Smith, Pagans and Christians in the City
Lagniappe-
Ed’s Corner: Enough Money To Get Myself A Nice Steak Dinner & Tricking You Into Paying Us
REVIEW LINK
I reviewed Michael Trask’s Ideal Minds for San Antonio Review. Michael Trask is one of my favorite covid-period discoveries, a literary critic who uses theory in ways that actually illuminate. He has a book on the postwar period I really enjoyed (Camp Sites), and Ideal Minds, which discusses the intellectual and literary history of the seventies, also satisfies. Give it a read! https://www.sareview.org/pub/l1c70diq/release/1
VIDEO CONTENT
Yes, another Birthday Lecture. I have taken positive steps towards doing interviews! But they take some time. In the meantime, enjoy my discussion of the ways in which the craze for Special Forces, and especially sniper, media content interacts with our ideas of meritocracy.
REVIEWS
Steven Smith, “Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac” (2018) - I read this one as part of a piece I’m writing prompted by another (better, shorter) book on millennial religious/spiritual practices. I’m going to be reading some speeches and writings by Senate creep Josh Hawley next for that project, so really treating myself here!
At first, I was excited for this book. Reviews and the author of the better millennial spirituality book made it sound intelligent. “Aha, perhaps here, we will get a contemporary intellectual conservative!” I was thinking. Still that Michael Mann impulse to find worthy opposition, a Neil in a world of Waingros… This Steve Smith guy is no Waingro, no reichsadler tattoo and (probably) no dead sex workers (one of the weaknesses in “Heat,” they just… threw that in and did nothing with it- I love “Heat,” but it has holes you can drive a truck through). He’s a Christian conservative law professor. Alas, he is no Neil. He’s… I dunno… one of the people ducking when the big gunfight spills into a grocery store parking lot? It’s just a metaphor.
Beyond reviews, I thought “Pagans and Christians in the City” sounded promising because it seemed to promise a look at the perennial political problem of how people with radically different ideas of the sources of authority and rules of conduct might live together. I dreamed it might get into the nitty-gritty of how different cosmopolitan societies arranged these things, and used that knowledge to analyze the culture war situation of today. It is that relationship between millennial spirituality and civic life — such as it is today — that I intend to interrogate in my piece.
Alas, what I got instead was… well, I’ll say it was an interesting experience, my emotional state through reading this book. We begin with excitement. Smith says he’s going to show that today’s culture wars align with the culture wars in imperial Rome, a conflict between Christians and pagans. More abstractly, the conflict is between believers in a transcendent spirituality — the ultimate source of power and authority comes from something outside of the world, as believed by the Abrahamic religions (my understanding is that it might be a bit iffier than that in Judaism, but ok) — and believers in immanent spirituality: the idea that the sacred inheres in this world. Most of the “pagans” don’t worship ye olden gods nowadays, and, as Smith and many others note, neither did many of the pagans of antiquity, especially the educated types who left their ideas for us to read. But they do have a distinct attitude to the world and the hereafter that transcendent spirituality does not share. Ok, so far, so good- maybe not all the way “right” but coherent and interesting.
Then, the erudition. I’m fine with people flashing their learning around. It’s fun. I do it. But A. the sententious gentleman-scholar affect conservative intellectuals put on gets old, fast and B. it’s tone unsuited to content. Don’t come the classics scholar when you’re not reading in the Latin and Greek originals. All of Smith’s arguments about what Rome was like come from secondary sources. As best I can tell, they’re mostly legitimate, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with structuring an argument from them. But I’m relating the subjective experience of reading, and it got annoying as he went on and on in this performatively judicious tone (lawyers gonna lawyer I guess) that he hasn’t got the erudition for…
So, disappointment is, I guess, the theme going forward. Especially once he stops noodling on the classics and gets down to brass tacks, several different types of disappointment hit at once. First, he quickly dismisses the concept of secularism. Very few people are truly secular, he says, because it’s too hard to face the universe that way. There’s some truth in that, the first part, anyway, and there is a long list of supposed seculars, from smart people like Richard Dworkin to stupid people like Sam Harris, who find their way back to some acceptable spirituality. Smith says that spirituality tends to be a worldly, “immanent” one, and while that’s true in some cases, the Harrises of the world, for all their flirtation with things like Buddhism, also clearly believe in forces at work transcendent and vengeful enough for any bearded Semitic sky god… but the real stupid line Smith uses is that you can tell no one’s secular because so few people agree with strict utilitarianism- so few are fine with violent eugenics, basically. It’s basically “you can’t be a good person without god” gone to law school.
It’s basically downhill from there. Things get more lawyerly and myopic as Smith focuses on his instances of the ways in which transcendent-Christians (and Jews and sometimes Muslims, he hastens to add) and immanent-pagans can’t live together without conflict over public space, and how it’s all the latter’s fault for pushing their immancence-religion-posing-as-secular-fairness on people. At this point, I was mainly hoping for some entertaining freakouts. If the dude couldn’t bring real insight, at least he could amuse us all with some good shrieking about “ethical sluts” and trans people in bathrooms, right? That’s an established pattern- pseudo-erudite maundering followed by the freakout. But no such luck. There’s just the amusement factor of him fighting the last war, the gay marriage war. Forget Japanese soldiers abandoned on Pacific islets still thinking the war is going on- this is like a salaryman at Mitsubishi not getting the war is over after the side that won agreed to reconstruct his country (like how gay marriage has partially domesticated queerness).
The stupid thing is, there is a story here. There are legitimate questions of collective life that “live and let live” — my go-to answer — doesn’t answer. You’d figure the right, with its interest in the details of hierarchy, one of the main arrangements used in organizing society, would have something to say, here. But no. I’ve said before how the right’s embrace of sentimentality since the Reagan era has kneecapped it intellectually, and this exposes another liability of power to thought: they fuel their rule-making machine with the petty grudges of pedants and martinets, letting them climb the ladder and telling them they’re smart when really, they’re just widgets. I give this an extra star for groping towards a real set of questions, but ultimately, it was a big disappointment. **
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: Enough Money To Get Myself A Nice Steak Dinner & Tricking You Into Paying Us
Lest you be too concerned about the financial arrangements here at Melendy Ave. Review, I want you all to know that Peter does pay me a cut of the profits from the subscription model as is only fair in exchange for the work I do writing this column. The actual percentage I can’t really call to mind, I wasn’t really paying attention during negotiations, leaving most of the bargaining table maneuvering to Mithra, who worked out a separate treat based compensation package for herself in exchange for appearing in the weekly photos. But by years end I expect to have enough to get myself a nice steak dinner from Ed’s Corner residuals. Naturally having now landed a paying gig I’ve shifted into the mental mode of everyone who has just pulled down their first paycheck from a new firm, namely deploying every ounce of my cunning toward the twin goals of doing the least amount of work possible, and at the same time angling to increase my take home pay by as much as possible. The way forward to the second part is obvious, but not entirely easy, I just need to convince more people to take up paid subscriptions to the bonus content to the newsletter. However, these are lean and uncertain times, some people don’t have the money to spend on subscriptions at the moment, and please don’t beggar yourself for our sakes. Even those that do may have been trained by the recent climate of uncertainty to hold onto their money unless some unprecedented event comes up that might bring a great expense with it. In either case, a general appeal to rationality then is not the best way forward, there are too many good sense arguments against taking on an expense you can honestly afford to live without.
If straightforward persuasion is out, then the only way forward is to trick you the reader into subscribing. In a sense that’s just what advertising is. Any pitchman worth their salt will seek to get at your wallet by first distracting you with some flourish, and then be quick about handing you your change so that you’re well on your way before you realize that you’ve spent money in the first place. It might seem counterproductive to tell someone you’re setting out to trick that you’re about to trick them. But first of all, as I laid out earlier, I’m not going to be putting much effort into my work here now that I’m past the interview, and secondly I’m playing a combination of quiet moves in a strategic long game where eventually, months down the road, you’ll suddenly realize you have been outfoxed just as you finish voting on what book Peter should read for his next review. Here my second goal is informed by my first, the means by which I’ll trick you into subscribing to the newsletter is by publishing a low effort listicle.
Now, despite my smug sense of self-assurance that I’ll ultimately be able to trick you into subscribing to the newsletter, I don’t think a list of Top Ten Reasons Why You Should Subscribe to Melendy Ave. Review will convince you to do that. No, that’s too straightforward. Instead my cunning ploy is to provide you with a list of interesting online content that are generally available online, but are also seeking patrons or other means of support. These artistic projects are so compelling that any who could reasonably afford it will quickly open their wallets to contribute. This is the first step in the long con, as the constant stream of good content that draws financial support, by contributing to one and then another, thoroughly funded readers will become habituated to acting as patrons for creative endeavors, and thus predisposed, one day you’ll come by Melendy Ave. Review and before you know it I’ll be another step on my way to a nice steak dinner. With my motives well established, let’s get to this list of content.
First off is the YouTube channel Drawfee. If you’ll remember about a year ago, the College Humor channel laid off nearly all of its website staff in one go, and the Drawfee staff were the artists for the site, drawing many of the comics and other graphics. For many years before being laid off, the Drawfee crew hosted weekly livestreams and other videos of them drawing various drawing prompts from their fanbase live with comedic commentary all throughout. When College Humor rapidly downscaled, the Drawfee crew were able to arrange a licensing deal where they could keep their highly popular YouTube channel, but have to fund it themselves through Patreon. If you’re at all interested in illustration, or you just like to hear a group of talented professionals with a good repartee riff about some really absurd creature there in the midst of drawing live on screen, it’s well with the watch.
Next up we have another artist I know mostly through YouTube, although this artist is a musician, and I suppose occasionally an animator, Jack Stauber. Jack Stauber writes incredibly catchy pop songs as a strange counterpoint to some truly disturbing claymation animations. For some reason his song “Buttercup” is used in compilations of clips from the popular competitive co-op game Among Us, where the imposter is caught red handed murdering a crew member, at least when the clip doesn’t use the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme. Despite the artistic pairing with the disturbing animations on his channel, the music can and does stand on its own. Many of his songs have been collected on what he calls Micro Pop singles, and are always a blast to listen to. Just enjoy the fresh pop hooks, and don’t think too much about the lyrics, unless you’re looking to work through some anxiety about religious obligation or all of your teeth falling out, two strangely persistent themes that run throughout his lyrics.
I suppose while I’m passing by the way of Jack Stauber, I should also mention the Korean animator 람다람, or “rdr” if you prefer English. Similarly to Jack Stauber, rdr’s page consists of animated music videos, but I’d describe her more as an animator than a musician, especially since she doesn’t write any of her own songs and instead animates music videos using an interestingly designed cast of characters. I first caught wind of her work when Jack Stauber appreciated her work enough just to let her publish a music video for his song Two Time without licensing it, which is good on him for doing so because it’s a very well constructed video. rdr has a very strange aesthetic, maybe not so strange as the dirty claymation and teeth of Jack Stauber’s videos, but they draw from a Lisa Frank color pallet of pastel colors but are dripping with a sense of psychological dread and tension. The main character that runs throughout most of the animations is Daram, a young woman with bright pink hair, a squirrel tail, and a violent anxiety problem, only hinted at through imagery and the context provided by the music. I get the broad strokes of the character and don’t speak a lick of Korean.
My final recommendation is a podcast, Rude Tales of Magic. Actual-play role playing game podcasts are a dime a dozen these days, with Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition seeming to have led to a renaissance in the form, but this one in particular is special. This outing by web comic artist Brandon Reese isn’t interested in typical role playing game standards of world building, or conveying fantasy tropes through rule sets. The action is less focused on rules, in fact there are portions of the game where they clearly edit out dice rolls in favor of getting to the improvised action between the players. The not safe for work recordings are more interested in recreating the cartoon logic of animators like Tex Avery or Chuck Jones rather than Tolkienesque fantasy, and the humor they draw from the loose interactions is more geared toward comedy than action or epic storytelling. If you’re looking for a good laugh, give it a listen.
Well, that ought to cover it as far as artistic endeavors that could use some financial support go. Even if you don’t have money to contribute at the moment, there’s plenty of free content for you to enjoy. If you have the money to spread around, you too could be a patron of the arts. Hopefully when you see the benefits you reap from your patronage elsewhere you’ll be more liable to patronize us at Melendy Ave. Review. A good deal for both you and us, and for the artists who produce this content. Next month I’ll be back with more media theory stuff, but for now I’ve got a steak dinner to earn.
Miss Mithra hopes Ed will share said steak dinner for her. Anything else isn’t worth getting out of bed!
I mean, yeah... "secular" as an identity is pretty rare... but most Americans want to live in a secular society. Something like 80% of us, crossing all boundaries of piety and faith! In such a polarized age I think Mr. Smith should appreciate such common sentiment, not denounce it.